3X3X3 unites!
Posted by Paul Caskey on April 25, 2013On Tuesday evening Elise and I welcomed the 3X3X3 dancers into our home for a little maritime hospitality! So sweet meeting everyone and learning a little about who they are and what inspires them in life and dance. This CanDance inspired/supported creation exchange project is really exciting and I’m so jazzed to work with Tangente in Montreal and La Rotonde in Quebec City. Creating opportunities for artists to meet and exchange ideas is dear to Live Art Dance’s heart, and I realised just how broad this exchange is while drinking wine with our guests. The seven people in the photo hail from Edmonton (Ashely), Regina (Lauren), Quebec (Brice & Maryse), New York (Dorian), and Halifax (Susanne & Jacinte). That’s a lot of origins and diverse geography! Art originates with ideas generated by people who bring their collective experience into the present. I am really looking forward to the present of 3X3X3 from 8-9:45pm, April 25-27 in the Sir James Dunn Theatre.
3X3X3 and Why I’m Lame
Posted by Paul Caskey on April 19, 2013How many times have I confessed to being the worst correspondent? Personally I’m having a hard time believing that my most recent post was in Sept ’12! How can I have failed to write about all the great shows and events that have occupied HRM’s cultural calendar these past 7+ months!!?? Forget about the learning curve of a new position, staff turnover, a nasty production schedule that had us launch the season with 3 shows in 3 weeks… All that is just work and we should be able to roll up our sleeves and push through it. What I recognise is a shift in my time management priorities: for the many past months my usual writing hours – evenings and weekends – have been devoted to house and home, meaning sitting in front of the computer has taken a back seat. What more needs be said: life is effervescent, and I’ve been enjoying (immensely!) watching my little ‘uns grow! I promise to stop promising to improve the regularity of my correspondence… We’ll just let it ride and see where it goes. So… It seems like our season is book-ended by “creation” events: we started with STIR, a really exciting creation … Continue reading
STIR things up!
Posted by Paul Caskey on September 4, 2012You never know what you’re going to find when you go digging. A few years ago I began filtering the dirt in my back yard to put in a garden… I dug up so much stuff: broken bottles (Minard’s linament anyone?), car parts, claw feet from a bathtub (the fourth must still be out there somewhere), rusty nails, and clunkers galore… Someone told me my neighbourhood had been filled in with the rubble from the Halifax Explosion, and seeing as how our house was built in 1917, I suspect they’re bang on. On the surface, everything was pretty (well, pretty overgrown is more accurate) and gave no indication whatsoever of what lay beneath the surface. Like in the photo below… this used to be a parking lot up until a few days ago. Who would have known beneath its dilapidated surface lay the residue of some former life? But there it is, a foundation upon which something, at some point in time, was built. I began thinking about what we see and what we don’t see when the back hoes first started unearthing these bricks and mortar. Perhaps because Live Art Dance is currently involved in a project that is … Continue reading
The Grand Finale
Posted by Paul Caskey on June 17, 2012Saturday June 16 marked the final day of the 25th edition of the Canada Dance Festival and it was a doozy: Adelheid (Heidi Strauss) at 4pm at La Nouvelle Scène, Mayday (Mélanie Demers) at 7pm in the NAC Studio, and TDT at 8:30 in the NAC Theatre. I was also planning on seeing Sylvie Desrosiers at the Arts Court space earlier but closing down the festival bar the night before, combined with the departure of all my grrls, made for a late start to the day. Playing on the final day is never easy… all the conferencey stuff is over so audiences are beginning to thin out; those that are still there, les durs des durs, are beginning to get saturated. For me, watching my partner and daughters jump in a cab and head off for the bus station was the beginning of the end. All of a sudden time shifted. Children demand that we be present in the moment and their departure created a vacuum in which I momentarily drifted… I came back to the timed world with a great Holy sh*t! I’ve got 15 minutes to get to La Nouvelle Scène (I’d normally want 30 minutes to do … Continue reading
Dance meets Life
Posted by Paul Caskey on June 17, 2012Sometimes life conspires against our most ardent wishes… Last night was my most anticipated night of the Canada Dance Festival… Halifax’s Lisa Phinney in the NAC Studio at 7pm followed by Vancouver’s 605 Collective in the Theatre at 8:30. I was really looking forward to seeing Phinney’s Analogy for Solid Bones again (Live Art Dance premiered this work a few years ago), and who wasn’t looking forward to 605′s full length sophomore effort? So there we were, the whole family: my six-year old, Clara, looking forward to seeing her maman dance, Elise’s maman Chantal, en voyage avec nous to help take care of the kids, my buddy Scott, in from Montreal to catch some of the fest, and my beautiful baby Camille, firmly strapped onto my chest in the snuggly. This wasn’t going to be Camille’s first show – some of you will remember her rapt attention in Rebecca Lazier’s gutsy work, Coming Together/Attica – but alas, tonight things weren’t looking good. As soon as the she was strapped into the snuggly the hiccups started… as soon as the lights went to black the protest started… How was she to know that all maman’s absences, the reason papa has been … Continue reading
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The new fAce(s) of Dance in Hfx
Posted by Paul Caskey on May 21, 2013Dance as an art form is so ephemeral, coming to life for the specific duration of a given performance and then disappearing into memory. Sure, it's true that all live performance is like this, IE. exi... [read more]
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